One fishes for the expect5ed and the unexpected and learns from both. If fish or rivers or lakes were even nearly predictable, a good part of the sport would be gone. But fish live where men don’t, in ways of which men have only a rudimentary understanding. Bye the pleasant, haphazard means of going fishing one learns and unlearns about them constantly. Occasionally, understanding seems almost within reach; in the next moment something has happened to put it as far away as ever. For twenty years I have fished the two-mile length of the Campbell below the falls, and now I know more questions to ask myself about the river and it its fish than I could have dreamed of twenty or even ten years ago.

Yet the things one does know are immensely precious and it becomes immensely important to go year after year in the same time and the same laces, to retest the knowledge to try to recapture the sensation to find differences and exceptions.

I suppose it is silly to be so concerned about the response of a fish to a bunch of hair and feather tied on a hook. Yet that is what remains exciting. The stop, the pull, the slash the dimpling rise, the surging, savage boil, all those are sensations so powerful that hand and arm and eye write them indelibly on the mind, and they remain there, on recall at any time. Light on the water, break of wave, sweep of current, mountains at one’s back, the cry of a loon, beaver or otter swimming; the drive of gale, the peace of a summers day or the silence of winters cold; warmth of friendship, a mind that thinks in tune with one’s own—all these things can gild the moment, add to it, exalt it. But the end of it all, the reason one goes back and back, the logic of illogical obsessions, is simply the unpredictable way of a fish with a fly.

juro

02-17-2003, 03:51 PM

Amen, brother Roderick - thanks Jeff I needed that.

removed_by_request

02-17-2003, 06:12 PM

RHB wove words that echo he era he lived in.

It would have been grand to be alive in the PNW back then.

DEERHAAWK

02-17-2003, 09:09 PM

We are all, Seeker's of Truth
We are all, Hunters
We are all, Teller's of the Tale's of both...
Roderick Haig - Brown had achieved what is known as "Ken". It is a perception or farsightedness that is beyond the norm, sharp and acute. It is a field of vision that comes from knowledge and awareness, and produces wisdom!
Thank's Jeff
Deerhawk